Month: March 2019

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In May 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt visited Grand Canyon for the first time. He was, in a word, gobsmacked.

“It is beyond comparison—beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world,” he wrote. “Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity, and loveliness. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.”

Roosevelt’s wishes, in a sense, have come true. Since Grand Canyon’s inception as a national park in 1919, the 1,904-square-mile preserve has seen more than 212 million visitors who come to hike its trails, spot its 373 species of birds and 91 types of mammals, observe the rock formations, raft the Colorado River, and, of course, post to Instagram.

But that grandeur, sublimity, and loveliness Roosevelt spoke of? It has been marred by the tramplings of feet and the inevitable trappings of time. The Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1963, has dramatically altered downstream ecology, and the park has a nearly $330 million deferred maintenance backlog that includes much-needed repairs to roads and trails and upgrades to the infrastructure for visitors, whose numbers keep growing. Add to this list climate change and the ways it will affect how we experience the park—and what we’ll see in it.

But just how will Grand Canyon National Park, which celebrates its 100th birthday on February 26, change in the next century? Here’s what eight experts think.

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Amy East: Research Geologist, U.S. Geological Survey

If they keep using the dam operations they’ve been using, we’ll see more erosion of the sandbars in the river corridor that still exists and more vegetation takeover of the parts of those sandbars that aren’t eroded by the flow. There will also be more erosion of archaeological sites. You’ll probably see new debris fans that are bigger than they would have been without the dam, because the flows aren’t as big as you need to push some of those rocks downstream. That could make some really exciting new rapids.

It will be harder for people to find places to camp. There are tens of thousands of people riding that river corridor every year, and they need places to sleep every night. Some of the most common and most popular camps are on sandbars, on sand deposits. And those are getting smaller.

We will certainly see continued changes in the population dynamics in the fish and aquatic ecosystem and then everything that goes along with it. You change one thing, you change everything else, right? It’s all connected to what happens when you’re in the river down there.

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We’ve been working on fees and permits in our portion of the canyon for many years. We’re getting ready to make our presence known, with our law enforcement and our cultural folks, and educating the public as they come down the river that they’re crossing through Hualapai land. But that’s going to come in time.

Most important, though, is just the importance and the recognition of the tribes—Hualapai, Havasupai, Hopi, Navajo, and others who have had affiliations with the canyon way before the anniversary of Grand Canyon National Park. Acknowledgement is something that’s important.

In 100 years, the canyon will still be here. Hualapai will still be here. We’ll still have our traditional places that we take care of throughout the canyon. We have a lot of sites that are ours to go back and let the people of our past know that they haven’t been forgotten, and we still acknowledge them there in the canyon, and we’re still there watching over things.

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Patrick Gonzalez: Forest Ecologist and Climate Change Scientist, University of California, Berkeley

Our research shows that human-caused climate change exposes the U.S. national parks more severely than the United States as a whole to hotter and more arid conditions. And cutting greenhouse gas emissions—from cars, power plants, and other human sources—can save parks from the most extreme heat.

In the Colorado River basin, the hotter temperatures of climate change have coincided with low precipitation. This has intensified the drought that has lasted since 2000, and the Colorado River flow is down by one-fifth. Across the western United States, human-caused climate change doubled the area burned by wildfire from 1984 to 2015 compared to the area of natural burning.

If we don’t reduce our emissions, under the worst scenario, the drought could continue and the flow of the Colorado River would be down by half. This threatens riverside forests at the bottom of the canyon. Projections of wildfires under continued climate change project increases by maybe a quarter, and wildfires tend to change the vegetation.

I think about the best scenario—a scenario on which we’ve already been making progress: a future in which we’ve met the Paris agreement goal of limiting climate change to 1.5 to two degrees Celsius would be a world where we depend on the sun and the wind, rather than polluting technologies. It’s a world where we’ve limited the heating in national parks to two-thirds of what it could have been under the worst scenario, and people would get to the Grand Canyon on some form of renewable energy–powered public transit and be able to see a vibrant and flourishing national wonder.

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Kevin Dahl: Arizona Program Manager, National Parks Conservation Association

You can’t live in a house that keeps falling apart. There could be a dystopian future for the park if we’re not able to fund not just the Park Service, but all the things that make this country a great place to live.

When I was seven years old, I first visited the Grand Canyon. I loved the rim and picked up rocks to see how far I could throw them in there. I remember a park ranger putting his hand on my shoulder and saying, “Excuse me. We don’t do that, and here are the reasons why.” So there will be a lot more people throwing rocks if the Park Service isn’t well-funded. We’re dealing with new possibilities.

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Kristin Haskins: Director of Research, The Arboretum at Flagstaff, and Co-Editor of ‘Plant Reintroduction in a Changing Climate: Promises and Perils’

As you go up in elevation, there are different vegetation or life zones. What we think will happen is that you’ll see a transition from the current zone to the zone just beneath it. As it becomes warmer and drier, you’ll see vegetation that is more classic to those environments: piñon-juniper will shift more into just juniper and maybe some grasses, which is the vegetation zone that falls below it.

Unfortunately, invasive species come from all over, and anytime you have more traffic going in and out of an area, you have more opportunities for the introduction of invasive species, so that’s been on the rise with increased visitation. There aren’t really protocols in place to check shoes, to check shoelaces, to check equipment to see if there are invasive seeds that could fall out and then grow. It’s definitely a problem, but I don’t even know how you would police that.

In 100 years, I think the park will still be spectacular. It will just be dressed a little different.

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Karl Karlstrom: Distinguished Professor of Geology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of New Mexico

The water that supplies Grand Canyon Village is piped from a spring across the canyon called Roaring Springs. This pipeline is old, and it’s breaking and leaking. And climate change threatens to decrease the snowpack year by year on the North Rim, which is what feeds the spring. So, over the next hundred years, as climate change predictions show, that snowpack is going to decrease dramatically, which means that the one source of water—Roaring Springs—very well might not be able to meet its present demand, let alone increasing demand. There’s a lot of geochemistry and structural geology about water that’s going to be important for the sustainability of the park.

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Paul Beier: Regents’ Professor of Conservation Biology and Wildlife Ecology, Northern Arizona University

Most of the climate models show that it’s going to get drier and hotter, and drier is going to be more serious than hotter because springs could dry up. We have endemic snails in some of these springs. What’s going to happen to them? Bighorn sheep need to drink water, and if they have to go a few extra miles to find it, their range might shrink. Some amphibians depend on these habitats, so their populations could decline. They could then lose genetic connectivity—on occasion, an animal will breed in a new pond, and you get more gene flow occurring throughout the population. But if they start to retract, then you’ll have individual populations that could quite plausibly become inbred, which can cause decreases in survival, fitness, and production. How severe this will be is unknown. But all of these almost certainly will happen.

There will be losses. But we might have some good things. Wolves might reoccur in the park. Jaguars were once that far north, and they could come back.

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Joel L. Pederson: Professor and Head of the Department of Geology, Utah State University

Humans naturally think on the timescales of decades or years, but it’s important to know the geologic context so you can separate the actions of man from things that probably would happen regardless. But I also don’t want anyone to say, “Alright, these things are being destroyed in the bottom of Grand Canyon, but if we came back in a million years, they would be gone anyway.” I’m not sure that’s the most helpful way to think about things.

How far in the future would we go before we came back and say, ‘Hey, wait, this place definitely looks different’? There’s different flora, there’s different fauna, the river looks different, and instead of these rocky hillslopes, they look a little more like ones we normally see in Colorado instead of Arizona?

I think that it would just take 10,000 to 20,000 years, max. It has taken something like 5 to 10 million years to make Grand Canyon as we see it today. And even if we come back 10 million years from now, there’s still going to be something noticeable there. It would be tens of millions of years before we would return to northern Arizona and literally have no idea that the Grand Canyon was there.

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It’s official: the humble sleeping bag, along with other iconic outdoor gear like the fanny pack and the fleece jacket in years past, has finally been inducted into the extravagant world of haute couture.

At Milan’s Fashion Week, models donned Moncler’s fall 2019 Genius collection—a collaboration between designers Pierpaolo Piccioli and Liya Kebede. The line consists of whimsical pleated gowns made out of ridiculous amounts of down. The ensembles are basically our beloved puffy rendered in its most flamboyant forms, the very definition of goose-plucked eleganza. The gowns are striking not only for their famous Piccioli silhouettes, but also for their colorful Ethiopian textile graphics from Kebede’s line called Lemlem.

The collection has earned headlines at fashion-focused publications like The Cut, W, and Paper, for its inclusive innovation. But it’s also generated Twitter buzz for the gowns’ relationship to a stuffable winter accessory.

In the recently released lookbook, one of the models has her head tightly hooded in pink down, as if it were a sub-zero night and she had pulled her zipper up and cinched the garment’s draw cords. The aesthetic is almost comically similar to memories of friends on backpacking trips with their small faces engulfed in their Big Agneses, Marmots, and Sierra Designs.

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As a sleeping bag owner, gear nerd, and writer with a few fashion bylines to my name, I have spent a lot of time thinking about this collection and I have a few questions. First: Do these ensembles come with a stuff sack? How many grams are they? Would it be an acceptable replacement for my down quilt? Would any of them (particularly the lovely creamsicle colored one) pair well with my Thermarest? Is the down responsibly sourced? And what about the models? How much did they sweat while wearing them inside that Milanese villa for the photoshoot? Howbreathable is the material?

Moncler didn’t return my request for comment on any of the above questions at the time of writing, but I got some insight into the puffy gowns while speaking over the phone with popular fashion commentator Luke Meagher of Haute Le Mode.

“I think the down jacket material is not something that fashion has been experimented with all that much,” he says. “I know we’ve had the Norma Kamali sleeping bag moment and the Giambattista Valli Gamme Rouge moment, but I think there is a real beauty in taking something that is very normalized and utilitarian to us like the down puffy that we use everyday in cities, on the slopes, and to make sleeping bags out of and transforming it into something avant-garde.”

Meagher, who is notorious for being impressed hardly ever, first spoke affectionately on the Moncler line after actor and fashion icon Ezra Miller wore a piece of the collection to the Paris premiere of the Fantastic Beasts sequel. Up until that point, the line had only been worn by women. Miller arrived in the sharp black down floor-length coat, complete with cape, hood, and gloves that matched the actor’s jet black lipstick. The appearance came not long after his profile in The Hollywood Reporter, in which Miller said, “I don't identify as a man. I don't identify as a woman. I barely identify as a human."

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Various writers compared Miller’s look to that of Darth Vader, No-Face (the ghost from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away), the caterpillar from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland—and a black Klymit 20-degree mummy sleeping bag.

“I think that the real significance of Ezra wearing the gown to a public premiere is that he began to break down so many barriers on gender,” Meagher says. “We’re beginning to no longer put these strict binaries on clothing and Ezra really brought the conversation to the forefront with the help of the Moncler puffy and Pierpaolo.”

For lots of parents, it’s more like stay-outside parenting. And it’s hard work.

It was obvious early on that my son Mason was spirited. He slept horribly at night, and the only way I could keep him happy all day was by taking him outside for extended periods of time. My husband’s job is rotational and far away from us in Alaska, so we realized that it made the most sense for me to become a full-time parent. I gradually went from full-time website consultant and freelance content creator to part-time jobs here and there, and then those jobs became more occasional, and then I was “just mom.”

This new job was foreign to me, but the worst part was when people started asking me, “So, are you just a stay-at-home mom?” I know people don’t mean it to be offensive, and it’s something a lot of parents wish they could do. But it makes me cringe. I always used to want to spit back, “No, I am raising a human, and it’s really hard work. If I just stayed at home all day, my child would destroy me, because he’s a constant moving ball of energy. So, I’m actually a ‘stay-outside mom.’”

I never said any of this, but I became it. And I really committed. I branded myself as a stay-outside parent, built a website for other escapees like myself, and called it Hike It Baby. There are a lot of stay-outside moms (and some dads), and they come in all shapes, sizes, and skill levels. We all have one thing in common: kids who just can’t be inside.

There are other reasons to be a stay-outside parent: escaping from stacks of dishes, dealing with anxiety about how to entertain a baby for 12 hours straight, or combating the fear of missing out on one’s former pre-baby outdoor life.

And there are lots of ways to be one. You learn to be creative about diaper changes in the middle of a Northwest downpour in a cramped 2003 four-door Toyota Prius. You find more trails to explore than you ever would have found without a child, because they’re too easy to be in the guide books. You seek out relaxed indoor spaces like nature centers where people won’t glare at your child as he destroys their books and toys. You make friends who’ll still call back after a playdate when your overstimulated child bopped their sweet child on the head, for no good reason, in the middle of a park. You accept that your three-year-old might eat stale Cheetos for lunch if you forget to bring your cooler to the trailhead.

In hindsight, I now see that being a stay-outside-parent was good for me. It helped me muddle through postpartum depression in the early days, when I felt like I had no clue how to parent. Later, regularly being outside with other moms helped me open up and talk out my feelings about how Mason seemed different from other kids. He struggled with birthday parties, daycare—anything indoors, really—and it was on hikes, swapping stories with other parents, that I didn’t feel so alone.

It also helped my relationship. My husband is an extreme introvert to my very extroverted personality, and he could relate to me better as I became more of a stay-outside mom. The trail was the one place we seemed able to talk out fights or have serious discussions about Mason and life. I didn’t know this about my husband before we started spending heaps of time hiking—at first to help keep Mason calm and manageable, but then for ourselves as well.

And the outdoors have given me confidence and stronger parenting intuition. When you choose stay-outside parenting, you know that when all else fails, hiking is the only thing that will change your Tasmanian devil back into a human. Even if it’s 8 p.m. And that’s just the way it is.

Being a stay-outside mom is a job. It’s a sanity tool. It’s cheaper than therapy and has proven health benefits for everyone involved. And it makes potty training way easier. (Mason currently pees everywhere except in the bathroom. We’re working on it.)

So the next time you ask someone if she’s “just a stay-at-home mom,” rethink how you’re saying it. Parenting is hard, no matter where you do it. Add in an unexpected hailstorm, a heavy mosquito year, and a screaming three-year-old, and that mom should get a gold medal just for getting out the door.

What the admittedly confusing categorization actually means

We read the phrase “100-year flood” a lot in the news. It’s our attempt to describe the magnitude of a flood by putting it in context: “This crazy event is such a statistical anomaly, it only happens once every century!”

Truth is, that’s an abuse of statistics. The term doesn’t actually mean that a severe flood will occur only once every 100 years, and using it this way fails to reflect flood risk faced by certain areas.

First, some background. Scientists have spent decades painstakingly studying every waterway in the United States to determine how vulnerable the surrounding land is to flooding when heavy rain falls. Some areas are extremely susceptible to flooding, such as Cairo, Illinois, which sits at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Many other areas, however, would only see flooding in a catastrophic rainfall event, and maybe not even then.

Much of the way we think about flooding these days is shaped by flood insurance policies. As many homeowners know, flooding is not covered by standard homeowners insurance. Insurance companies decided in the 1950s and 1960s that it was simply too costly to cover flood damages as part of their regular policies. Congress passed the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) in 1968 as an affordable way for homeowners to purchase separate flood insurance policies if they happened to deem them necessary.

That meant the government had to come up with ways to regionally quantify flood risk in order to figure out how much to charge for insurance and how to create regulations for building in flood zones. The metric it settled on is the Annual Exceedance Probability (AEP).

The AEP is the statistical probability of seeing a certain level of flooding along a waterway during any given year. The standard the NFIP settled on for its “base flood”—the level of flooding at which regulations and mandatory insurance purchases kick in—is a 1 percent AEP. A place with such a rating would theoretically have a one in 100 chance of seeing severe flooding each year—or, in other words, when it did flood, it would be considered a 100-year event.

Scientists studied water flow and flooding data for thousands of streams and rivers across the country to determine how likely flooding is at any one location along these waterways. The basis for determining values such as 1 percent AEP or 0.2 percent AEP (one in 500 chance, or a 500-year flood) is essentially a reasonable worst-case scenario for flooding. These floods aren’t too common, but the threat is great enough that regulations and protections need to be in place.

We abuse these statistics when we think of a 100-year flood as occurring only once every 100 years. Some locations could have back-to-back 100-year floods, or they could go entire generations without ever seeing one. The phrase describes the chance of seeing a major flood in any given year—not a guaranteed interval between those floods.

Here’s the kicker. The values that constitute a 100-year flood can change over time. Rapid urbanization along a river could make a flood that used to constitute a 1 percent AEP occur more frequently, requiring scientists to raise the probability of such a natural disaster. This is a problem in Ellicott City, Maryland, where heavy suburban construction in recent decades has led to horrendous flooding that destroyed historic downtown Ellicott City twice in the past two years. The 1 percent AEP can also be adjusted downward due to flood-control measures like dams, levees, and physical alterations of waterways.

Climate change could make these extreme flooding events more common. A warmer atmosphere is able to hold more moisture, which increases the opportunity for events like massive thunderstorms and landfalling hurricanes to produce heavier rainfall totals than before. And that means more floods—much more often than once a century.

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In June 2018, the North Face launched an e-commerce platform dedicated to secondhand apparel. Called North Face Renewed, the website boasted an inventory of jackets, fleeces, and more that had been returned (or damaged in the factory)and repaired to like-new condition. 

The North Face didn’t launch North Face Renewed alone.Behind its platform and others like it—from companies like Icebreaker, Mountain Khakis, Pearl Izumi, Prana, Outerknown, Timbuk2, and Toad&Co—is a small factory called the Renewal Workshop, which has positioned itself at the center of the growing refurbished-gear movement. 

This isn’t your average gear-repair shop. Based in Cascade Locks, Oregon, the three-year-old company works with apparel brands across the outdoor and fashion industries to refurbish and resell damaged returns and imperfect inventory previously deemed unsellable. The U.S. has plenty of consumer-facing facilities that fix individuals’ equipment for a fee, such as Seattle’s Rainy Pass, but few that collect product directly from gear makers, fix it, and then put it back on the market at scale. 

By providing the technical labor, e-commerce systems, and financial modeling that brands need to go all in on reselling used product, the Renewal Workshop founders Nicole Bassett and Jeff Denby are part of a movement to fundamentally change the business model for making and selling outdoor gear. They join the likes of Yerdle, the repair and resale startup behind used-gear programs that have launched in the last year from Patagonia and REI.

The idea for the Renewal Workshop came to Bassett in 2014. The then 37-year-old had spent her career in sustainable-supply-chain management, first at Patagonia, then at Prana, then through her own consulting firm. As eco-friendly fabrics, recycled materials, and Bluesign manufacturing started to boom, she began to consider the next step for environmental consciousness in the industry.

Her answer: extending the life span of products already in circulation. “We need to figure out how to help brands make revenue off of existing product,” she says. The idea of a circular business model—one where companies prioritize recapturing product and giving it a second life rather than shipping it out with a one-way ticket to the landfill—led to the idea for a company that would help brands get there, a sort of sustainability enabler.

In 2015, Bassett tapped Denby, who cofounded the fair-trade cotton-apparel brand Pact, to join her as a business partner. By that December, they had formed the Renewal Workshop.Over the next few months, they bought and renovated a warehouse in Cascade Locks, and in June 2016, the Renewal Workshop officially opened for business with a skeleton team of seven sewing technicians and a starting roster of five partner brands: Ibex, Indigenous, Mountain Khakis, Prana, and Toad&Co.

Clothing comes to the Renewal Workshop from brands’ distribution centers—usually customer returns and damaged product that never made it to stores. The Renewal Workshop staff sorts it and determines what can be made new and what will need to be reused and broken down to help patch other pieces. The Renewal Workshop holds on to all unsalvageable apparel for this purpose, though Bassett is also working with several recycling centers in the hopes of starting a program for turning end-of-life clothing back into yarn for new fabric. “Textile recycling is an old thing,” she says. “You can recycle wool or cotton into new yarn. But most outdoor apparel is polyester, nylon, and spandex. There isn’t a lot of recycling available for that.” Several facilities are piloting systems to pull apart polyester, nylon, and spandex from blended materials and spin each into new fabric, though Bassett says the technology is still five to ten years out.

After sorting, everything gets washed in a machine that cleans using pressurized liquid carbon dioxideinstead of water, to reduce waste. Then it’s off to the sewing technicians, who replace missing buttons and broken zippers, patch holes, and stitch ripped seams, using material harvested from similar garments from the same brand. The Renewal Workshop then sells the refurbished apparel on its website for anywhere from 30 to 40 percent off and gives brands a cut. (The North Face pays the Renewal Workshop to run a separate, TNF-branded site.) 

In an age when sustainable design and manufacturing is ever more in demand, the Renewal Workshop addresses a hypocrisy few in the outdoor industry ever talk about: every shirt made from recycled water bottles and every jacket made with recycled-polyester insulation will wind up in a landfill. The materials and manufacturing may be eco-friendly, but putting another item out into the world is not.

“The elephant in the room for every brand is that, at the end of the day, the only way we can make money is by making new things,” says Bassett. “Addressing consumption is a big deal. We have to figure that out if we’re truly going to be sustainable.” Investing in refurbish and resell programs comes with inherent economic incentives, she says. Any money a brand can make off a product that has already sold once is a bonus. While Bassett has no illusions that companies will ever stop producing new clothing, she hopes that by opening up new revenue streams with used gear, they’ll be able to get away with making less of it. “Every time they don’t have to make a new product,” she says, “their impact goes down.”

What’s missing is the financial and environmental data that brands need to scale their own circular business models. That’s also where the Renewal Workshop can help. 

Twice a year, Bassett and Denby’s team provides partner brands a breakdown of overall sales, how much of the brand’s product the Renewal Workshop sold, how many items it saved from landfills, what products the Renewal Workshop team received, and what they had to do to fix it. “They know what brands need to make it make sense for them,” says Rachel Lincoln, director of sustainability at Prana. “If I can take data from the thousands of units she’s received and go to the design team and tell them there are holes showing up in the knees of a particular pant model, that’s valuable.” 

Tensie Whelan, a professor of business and society at New York University, thinks the circular business model spells big opportunity, between textile upcycling, clothing-rental programs, and closed-loop manufacturing. “Accenture [a strategy and consultancy firm] has found it can generate $1 trillion in business opportunities,” she says. “Many in the apparel sector are exploring circular fashion.” In 2017, a number of companies—including Adidas, Eileen Fisher, Gap, H&M, and Nike—signed the 2020 Global Circular Fashion System Commitment, an agreement to focus on growing circular business models (the commitment also encourages companies to use more recycled materials). However, Whelan says it’s too soon to tell whether consumers will buy refurbished clothing at scale, since it usually retails for more than consignment clothing.

So far the Renewal Workshop’s program seems to be working. “We are very happy with how it’s going,” says James Rogers, director of sustainability at the North Face. “We’re already looking at what the next phase would be and thinking about how to take items back directly from consumers to increase inventory.” All of this means we may start seeing more renewed apparel on the market and more brands soliciting customers to send back clothing when they’re done.

Could refurbished clothing have a sizable impact on the outdoor and apparel industries’ waste problem if it’s widely adopted? All the experts we spoke with say yes. “When we look at the environmental impact of a brand, we know our biggest impact areas are around materials—how they are sourced and where they end up,” says Nikki Hodgson, manager of sustainable business innovation at the Outdoor Industry Association. “If we can find new ways to ensure materials are being kept in the loop for as long as possible, this will be a game changer.”

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As both political parties trade shots amid the government shutdown, America’s national parks are caught in the crossfire. Under a new policy adopted by the Trump administration, parks have been allowed to remain open with limited staffing during the lapse in appropriations, while some Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups have called for the parks to be closed, citing risks to visitors and damage to park resources.

National parks have long played a central role in D.C. budget battles. There’s even a name for it: the Washington Monument strategy, in which popular parks are shuttered as a form of leverage in spending fights. President Clinton used the strategy effectively in the nineties. During the 2013 shutdown, the Obama administration ordered all parks to close, including operations within parks that used no federal funds, a move that some viewed as a tactic to make the shutdown as visible as possible.

This time, parks remain part of the political playbook. Some critics say that by keeping parks open, Trump is attempting to minimize the impact of the shutdown, while one Democratic House aide told Bloomberg, “To the extent that national parks are a sympathetic face of shutdown damage, we’re thinking through how to use them in our work.”

The partisan gamesmanship over our national parks should make one thing clear: it’s time to get politics out of our parks. As a former park ranger, I know how politics can pervade parks and undermine the ability of local managers to sustain and protect them. Instead of politicizing our parks, we should be looking for ways to make them less vulnerable to Washington’s budget fights and ensure that they cannot be used as pawns to advance the agenda of any administration, whether Democrat or Republican.

Simply put, that means making parks less dependent on unreliable congressional appropriations. Today the National Park Service counts on Congress for the vast majority of its funding, yet Congress is notoriously stingy with park funding, regardless of which party is in control. This lack of funding has led to operational shortfalls and a deferred maintenance backlog of nearly $12 billion—four times the agency’s annual budget.

No one gets reelected for fixing a leaky wastewater system or for funding routine park operations, and politicians are often more interested in creating new parks than paying for existing ones. As President Obama’s interior secretary Sally Jewell said of the need for basic parks funding, “We have to hold a bake sale for everything.”

The result: our national parks are weaponized in partisan budget battles and prone to management decisions motivated more by politics than prudence.

As a ranger in Olympic National Park, I saw firsthand how this can play out. After decades of neglect from D.C., Olympic faces a backlog of more than $120 million in unmet repair needs and regularly operates with just 60 percent of the funds necessary to adequately maintain and run the park. The effects are evident: crumbling roads, washed-out trails, and dilapidated visitor facilities are all too common. In the iconic Hoh Rainforest, where I worked as a backcountry ranger, there’s usually only enough funding for a single ranger to staff the visitor center most of the year—despite it being one of the park’s most popular areas.  

It doesn’t have to be this way. Finding ways to insulate parks from the annual appropriations process would make them more self-sufficient and less vulnerable to political manipulation. Relying more on park visitors and even nonprofit or private-sector operators, or by establishing dedicated funding sources—perhaps similar to the system that uses hunting and angling to support wildlife conservation through license fees and taxes on gear—are just a few ways that would help reduce the influence of politics on our parks.

Yet some groups often seem reluctant to make national parks more self-reliant. Several environmental organizations have recently opposed the Trump administration’s decision to allow park managers to operate popular sites during the shutdown by tapping unspent visitor-fee revenue, which does not require congressional appropriation. (Due to internal restrictions imposed by the National Park Service, fee revenue has not typically been used for routine park operations and maintenance.) And the outdoor industry has so far resisted efforts to establish a so-called “backpack tax” on outdoor equipment that could be used to help fund parks and other public lands.

That’s a shame, because if our parks depended more on park users than on Congress, they would be less susceptible to the growing partisanship and political dysfunction of Washington. And if park managers had greater authority to retain fee revenue—and the ability to use fee funds as they see fit, whether for operations or otherwise—then they wouldn’t have to rely on Congress much at all. With a record-setting 1.5 billion visits over the past five years, what could be more reliable than park visitors themselves?

In Olympic, feescollected from visitors can be an important source of politics-free funding that directly benefits future visitors. And because such revenue doesn’t require appropriation from Congress, the park’s local managers can tackle the needs that matter most on the ground.

Thankfully, there are some efforts underway to establish park-funding mechanisms that don’t depend on congressional appropriations. Last year, bipartisan bills were introduced in both the House and Senate that would create an endowment-like fund of up to $1.3 billion annually in federal energy revenues devoted to maintaining parks and other public lands. The fund could be spent or invested toward future projects at the discretion of the Interior Department.

That’s a good thing, because if we truly want to protect our national parks, we need to find ways to protect them from Washington.

Shawn Regan is a research fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, and is a former ranger for the National Park Service.

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Eric Larsen, the polar explorer who recently attempted an unsupported speed ski trip to the South Pole, says his anxiety increases a hundredfold when he’s on an expedition. “It’s hard to describe what it’s like, but it’s uncertainty about your outcome, your gear, and what the duration of your trip will be,” he says. “It’s death by a thousand cuts, because it wears down your spirits over a long time.”

Stephen Haddelsey, a British historian who last fallpublishedIcy Graves, a book about early polar exploration, says the early arctic explorers called that feeling polar madness. They knew their temperaments changed during dark, cold days, and they struggled with isolation, complicated team dynamics, and fear. It turns out they were also often dealing with what we now call seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Frederick A. Cook, the surgeon on the Belgica Expedition of 1897, the first to spend winter in Antarctica, wrote in his notes from the trip: “The human system accommodates itself sluggishly and poorly to the strange conditions of the polar seasons, and we, too, are slow in adapting ourselves to the awful despondency of the long winter night.”

We’ve learned a lot about the edges of the known world since then, but we’re still trying to figure out how to deal with the toll this kind of exploration takes on the psyche. Research on mental health in isolated and environmentally harsh conditions is a developing field, but it promises insight into how humans might better cope with other extreme situations—like interplanetary exploration or a sufferfest backcountry mission.

In the early 1900s, explorers were trying to understand who might be prone to depression and how that might present itself on trips and impact teams. “They recognized early that in the long polar winters, people started behaving badly,” Haddelsey says. “They knew it was associated with dark winter, but they didn’t know it was physiological.” In those harsh environments, your body responds biologically to a lack of sunlight and a constant state of stress. Some people are more prone to negative psychological impacts, and Haddelsey explains that part of the struggle of managing depression and anxiety on those early trips was parsing out the difference between SAD and other kinds of mental-health problems—especially considering that at the time there was little scientific knowledge of either. Ernest Shackleton, who led three expeditions to Antarctica, conducted his own crew interviews using a personality rubric for finding men he thought were self-reliant, intelligent, and calm. Now, modern explorers like Larsen track and monitor their mental health to sort out the same questions. But highly intelligent, independent, emotionally stable people still struggle with isolation and darkness, and there are no concrete rules for avoiding it, Haddelsey says.

Nathan Smith, who studies the psychology of expeditions at the University of Manchester, says that the field has exploded since he began his research in 2013. Part of that is driven by NASA, which is funding research in Antarctica that it’ll apply to its work on Mars, because the Arctic can simulate conditions similar to space. Smith and his colleagues are evaluating how humans handle physiological and psychological challenges like cold, physical strain, and isolation, and developing strategies to mitigate their impact.

To do that, the researchers created a series of questions about mental health and group dynamics for arctic expedition members to fill out daily. These expedition journals, like the most recent ones from two 13-person teams at Antarctica’s Concordia station, offered Smith an expedition-wide profile of emotional peaks and troughs, which enabled him and his team to identify their sources, quantify the emotional stress experienced throughout the expedition, and even start to predict behaviors. 

Smith says that when people report changes in emotion, they don’t tend to report huge swings, but even the slightest change can provide insight. “When you see a small spike and it’s moving in the direction of negative, it means a lot,” Smith says—especially when that shift is reflected across the board.

He explains that expedition members often hold their emotions close, because they don’t want to burden their team. The diaries give them an outlet to air concerns, which largely turned out to be shared across the team. In extreme environments, people are often preoccupied with thoughts of friends and family living a normal life without them, and the feelings grow when they lack privacy. Small triggers—like a frustrating project or a sense of inertia—can lead to bigger mental-health spirals, because the circumstances preclude common coping strategies, like restorative alone time. 

The researchers are building off past knowledge. While reading through old trip logs, Haddelsey found that factors he assumed would contribute to depression—like hard work and remoteness—positively influenced the crew’s disposition. It turns out that feeling like you’re part of a team, staying busy, and being able to focus on an engrossing task without outside distraction, are all good for the brain. “Those bases that have the poorest communication with the outside world have better mental health records,” he says.

Admiral John Ross, who spent several winters in the Arctic in the 1830s and is credited with locating magnetic north, worked hard to prevent his men from turning inward. He helped them stay engaged with their crew by staging amateur theater projects and kept them busy with scientific work like meticulous record-keeping. These strategies “wouldn’t have prevented the onset of SAD, but it would have reduced it,” says Haddelsey.

Coping techniques haven’t changed muchfrom the early days of polar exploration. Larsen skips the base-camp vaudeville, but he starts his journeys as fit as possible to avoid physical challenges that might derail him psychologically. Once his trip is underway, he breaks it down into small manageable parts to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of time and space ahead of him. He’s also careful to balance positivity with realism. “At home, I’m an optimist off the charts, but the worst is when you have hope and it’s not realized. That emotional letdown really crushes you,” he says. (Larsen recently called off a solo speed attempt across the South Pole due to inclement weather and safety concerns.)

From a scientific perspective, Smith says that so far, there’s no single thing that wards off the mental-health challenges presented by these environments. His research has shown that what he calls emotion-focused coping strategies, or ways to reframe the situation and distract yourself, are among the most successful techniques. That might look like Larsen’s small manageable goals—say, moving one ski past the other—or it might mean adopting a moving meditation, like using music or mantras to get out of your head. But the most critical factor, according to Smith, is something that Admiral Ross figured out on his own: when the situation grows dire, some action—even the wrong action—is better than no action. “If we perceive we have the ability to cope, we will respond adaptively,” Smith says. “When we’re overwhelmed, we shut down and stop trying.”

We both break the law from time to time. But it’s not even close to a one-to-one exchange.

There’s a lot of finger-pointing and whatabout'ism in cyclist-driver discourse. “Those darn cyclists don’t obey traffic laws!” “Yeah?  Well neither do drivers!” And so forth.

The truth is that, yes, we both break the law from time to time. However, it’s not a one-to-one exchange—not even close. Quite simply, breaking a law on your bike is not the same as breaking that same law in your car, in the same way that one (1) Japanese yen is not worth the same as one (1) U.S. dollar. Yet in many jurisdictions (such as New York City, where I live) summonses and fines are issued as though they were.

By way of facilitating future discourse and hastening the inevitable conclusion that cycling is more ethical than driving, here is a handy chart for converting the common cyclist violations (or perceived violations) into their motor vehicle equivalents. Please refer to this prior to engaging in your next bikes-versus-cars debate.

Cycling Violation: Rolling a Stop Sign
Driving Equivalent: “Stopping” at a Stop Sign

Let’s get real: drivers never really come to a complete stop. The truth is cyclists typically roll stop signs at the same speed most motorists consider to be “stopping.” Meanwhile, a cyclist rolling a stop sign can typically bring a bike to a stop with two fingers on the brake lever in a matter of inches.

Cycling Violation: Rolling a Red Light
Driving Equivalent: Inching Forward at a Red Light

Actually, I’m being charitable to the drivers here. Cautiously rolling a red light on your bike when the coast is clear in order to conserve momentum and get a head start on the drivers bearing down on you from behind really isn’t a big deal. Inching, on the other hand, feels menacing to anyone else who’s not in a car. Still, I’ll allow it.

Cycling Violation: Cycling with Headphones
Driving Equivalent: Driving with the Windows Closed

Once again, I’m being charitable to the drivers. Thanks to sound-insulated cabins (not to mention engine noise, climate control, etc.), a driver listening to no music whatsoever still hears less than a cyclist wearing earbud headphones. Cars are basically giant sensory deprivation tanks, and in order to replicate that cyclists would have to ride around with end tables wrapped in bubble wrap on their heads.

Cycling Violation: Riding on the Sidewalk
Driving Equivalent: Parking with Your Bumper Hanging Over the Sidewalk

Should you ride your bike on the sidewalk? No. Is doing so an act of terrorism? Hardly. Usually it’s about as annoying as having to share the sidewalk with those double-wide strollers—or walk around the ass-end of someone’s car because they didn’t stop until their tires hit the curb. By the way, drivers drive on the sidewalk all the time to get in and out of parking lots and driveways. It’s about a thousand times more dangerous than riding a bike on the sidewalk yet totally legal, go figure.

Cycling Violation: Salmoning
Driving Equivalent: Backing Into a Parking Space

“Salmoning” is when a cyclist rides against traffic. Drivers do this all the time—backing down the block, passing in the oncoming lane—and while it doesn’t have a cutesy name to rally against, it’s way more dangerous. The nearest driving equivalent to salmoning on a bike is the perfectly legal act of throwing it into reverse for a few feet and parallel parking. Sure, it happens millions of times a day, but drivers still manage to do it in such a way as to take cyclists completely by surprise.

Cycling Violation: Riding Two Abreast
Driving Equivalent: Driving Half a Car

Few things irritate drivers more than having to nudge the wheel slightly in order to pass a pair of cyclists. I mean come on—two cyclists? Side by side?!? How rude!!! They’re almost taking up as much lateral space as half a Hyundai!

Cycling Violation: Riding Without a Helmet
Driving Equivalent: Driving Without a Life Jacket

Chances are that next time you get in your car you’re not going to follow Waze into Lake Champlain. But you might. Shouldn’t you wear a life jacket at all times just in case? Let’s start shaming life jacket-less drivers to make sure they do.

Cycling Violation: Not Having License and Registration to Operate a Bicycle
Driving Equivalent: Not Having a Heavy Equipment Operator’s License

It’s a common gripe among the anti-bike cranks: “Cyclists should be licensed and insured!” Bullshit. Your learner’s permit is called a “birth certificate” and your road test is called “balancing on two wheels.” Do you believe in unnecessary documentation? Go get a pilot’s license before driving your Kia, then we can talk.

Cycling Violation: Not Using Proper Hand Signals
Driving Equivalent: Not Using Proper Hand Signals

This is a rare situation in which the two violations are indeed equivalent—because nobody knows what the hell those signals mean anyway.

Our running columnist is an expert in the track and road running scenes, but the ultra world isn’t exactly his beat. He dove in head first at UTMB.

I have a confession: For someone who spends a lot of time writing about long distance running, my knowledge of the ultra scene is shamefully thin. Very long distance running, thankfully, isn’t my beat. I’m not a total ignoramus; I know about Jim Walmsley, Rory Bosio, and Kilian Jornet. I’ve read race reports on irunfar.com and have used the word “sufferfest” without sounding too affected. For the most part, however, I’ve always assumed ultrarunning was essentially long-distance speedhiking. 

Eager to further educate myself about this bizarre sport, I jumped at the opportunity to attend a press trip to last weekend’s Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB). In terms of event scale and talent level, this 105-mile loop around the Mont Blanc massif is arguably the most competitive ultramarathon in the world. The race starts and finishes in the French Alpine town of Chamonix and passes through Italy and Switzerland, as runners navigate over 30,000 feet of elevation gain. It’s a popular hiking trail, and ambitious wanderers are typically advised to give themselves about ten days to complete it. Last weekend, Xavier Thévenard, the overall winner of this year’s UTMB, did it in 20 hours and 45 minutes. Francesca Canepa won the women’s race in just over 26 hours.  

I followed most of the race from a press van. The experience gave me some insight into why UTMB has garnered such a vaunted reputation. I was also able to bolster my scant knowledge of ultrarunning. Here are some things that stuck with me. 

The Euros Know How to Cheer

During the pre-race press conference, the elite American athletes were asked about the differences between racing at home and in Europe. 

“A huge difference is the spectators. People here are fired up,” said 2015 Western States champion Magda Boulet. “They come out in the middle of the night to watch us run. That is just unheard of anywhere else.” 

She wasn’t kidding. On Friday night, I was standing in the rain near the 32 kilometer (20 mile) checkpoint in the village of Les Contamines-Montjoie (population: 1,200), and could barely hold onto my spot on the side of the course. There were so many people in street that it felt like a national holiday. Compared to the post-apocalyptic vibe of many U.S. track meets, witnessing such mass ebullience for a 100-mile slog was both uplifting and a little depressing. Next to me, Kurt Decker, the run geek extraordinaire who frequently appears on the podcast Talk Ultra, was getting emotional. “Can you imagine something like this back home?” Decker asked me. The rain made it hard to tell, but I think he was crying.  

Never Underestimate the Power of a Killer Soundtrack 

Part of why the UTMB inspires such zealous spectatorship has got to be the cinematic spectacle—the sheer pageantry of it all. It was difficult not to get caught up in the drama at the start. Imagine: Stone-faced runners assembled in Chamonix’s main square, as the minute hand of the clock tower creeps towards the 6 p.m. start time. Rows of people are flanking the first few hundred yards of the course—a lucky few are watching from the elevated balconies of the Hotel le Chamonix. Over this thrum of expectation speakers are blasting Vangelis’s “Conquest of Paradise”—a melody so portentous that if you listened to it while doing the laundry it would feel like you’re performing an exorcism. I think it was the soundtrack that really did it for me. I heard it approximately eight billion times over the course of the weekend and I’m still not sick of it. The New York City Marathon, by contrast, has “New York, New York,” as its kick-off song. Not a bad choice, but when I hear Sinatra I’m more inspired to go on a whiskey binge than to run 26 miles. 

Anything Can Happen in 105 Miles 

As with this year’s Boston Marathon, one of the main stories of the 2018 UTMB was the high attrition rate of pre-race favorites—particularly among the men. Two months removed from his record-setting triumph at Western States, Jim Walmsley wasn’t able to maintain his early lead and ended up dropping out. His teammate Tim Tollefson (a two-time UTMB podium finisher) also started strong, but took a bad fall early and eventually DNFed as well. American Zach Miller held the lead for several hours, but ended up pushing himself so hard that he could barely walk after 80 miles. Eventually, he was airlifted off the course. 

But the real shocker was that Jornet, the dauntless idol of ultrarunning and extreme mountaineering, was forced to quit after a prolonged allergic reaction to a bee sting. Yeah, a bee sting. 

When you’re racing 105 miles through the mountains, there’s an exponentially higher number of variables that can affect your performance. Of course weird shit can also happen in a short race, but, generally speaking, the longer you’re out there, the more can go wrong. This, I would argue, enhances the excitement. “That’s what is great in [ultra] racing,” Jornet said in a statement following his early exit. “Until the race, nothing is written.”  

Speedhiking Is Tougher Than It Looks 

Members of the media who wanted to experience one of the gnarlier sections of the UTMB were offered a chance to hike over the Grand Col Ferret—an Alpine pass which traverses the highest point of the course—a few hours before the race leaders would be coming through. Having failed to read the fine print, I wasn’t aware of this option until after the race had started, but I knew I wanted to do it. Never mind that I hadn’t packed a headlamp and that the hike was supposed to commence around 3 a.m. How hard could a “media hike” really be?

Pretty hard, it turns out. The march was lead by a perversely fit French mountain man who seemed intent on replicating a race atmosphere. After a rather brief introduction (“Okay, we go now.”), he took off into the switchbacking darkness at such a vicious pace that I thought he would stop after 30 seconds and reveal it was just some sick joke. But it wasn’t a joke and he did not stop. For the next hour, my hands were glued to my thighs as I pushed up the mountain while trying not to throw up on my puffy. When we reached the summit, my fellow Outside contributor and semi-pro ultrarunner Matt Hart wondered aloud if we’d gotten the FKT. He was being facetious. (I think.)

Cautious Racing Is Rewarded 

This year’s race was the third UTMB victory for Xavier Thévenard, the baby-faced Frenchman with the subtly villainous air of a Disney movie antagonist. The feat put “le Petit Prince,” as Thévenard is referred to in French media, on par with Jornet and François D'Haene, who also have three wins each. Meanwhile, no American man has stood at the top of the UTMB podium since the inaugural race in 2003. 

Why this discrepancy? Thévenard’s race might provide a clue. He ran intelligently, letting several other favorites go out hard and then gradually reeling them in as, one by one, they fell apart. It was a conservative approach that stood in stark contrast to the big guns on the American side. True to their reputation as devil-may-care frontrunners, Walmsley and Miller started aggressively, but eventually it caught up to them. It’s a racing strategy that’s either bold or reckless, depending on where you sit, but so far at least it hasn’t proved too effective in the French Alps. (Of course, the same criticism was leveled at Walmsley before he broke the record at Western States this year in dominant frontrunning fashion. So much for the peanut gallery.)  

In short, UTMB helped me understand—and respect—the grubby psychos of the ultrarunning world. From now on, if I hear one of my fellow road-racing snobs speak derisively about ultrarunning, I’ll be sure to squirt them with my hydration pack. 

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Whether you’re taking a cross-country road trip, overlanding in your four-wheel-drive rig, or heading up to the ski area, having the right tires on your vehicle will get you there safer and more comfortably. Many drivers don’t give their tires a second thought, but those black round things are the only connection your machine has with terra firma. Choose wisely, and you’ll vastly improve your ability to get where you want to go. Pick the wrong ones, and you could end up in a fender bender, stuck in the wilderness, or worse.

Basic Tire Construction

Quite a bit of science goes into these rubber doughnuts. Obviously, the base material is rubber, which is actually a shade of white when it’s pure. Tires become black after the addition of carbon black powder (commonly known as soot), which can be incorporated in different formulas to the rubber of your tires, primarily for strength and abrasion resistance. Carbon black and silica can be added to the compound to optimize grip, tread wear, fuel mileage, and strength.

Underneath the rubber, perpendicular belts of steel and nylon fabric are woven into blankets to help provide the tire with its structure and strength.

Tires are primarily spoken about in terms of four components: a bead, a sidewall, a shoulder, and a tread.

The is the part of the tire that connects it in an airtight seal to the metal wheel rim. This segment of the tire is constructed as a series of high-tensile steel wires wrapped in a hardened rubber, with ribs to prevent the tire from rotating on the rim.

The connects the contact patch of the tire to the rim, and its height helps determine the handling and ride of your car. A taller sidewall will generally help create a cushion between the road and your wheels, damping some abrupt impacts, like potholes and ruts. A shorter sidewall is usually desirable for grip on pavement.

The is the transition between the sidewall and the tire tread. Most on-road tires have a sharper shoulder angle, which reduces road noise and increases fuel economy. Off-road tires will often extend the tread pattern across the shoulder, allowing for more grip in loose terrain. This translates to more noise on pavement and less predictable grip when cornering, but the dirt-driving benefits are often worth the trade-off.

The most important part of the tire is the . This is the actual contact patch between your car and the ground. It is made up of tread blocks (the raised sections) and voids (the space between the blocks). In general, a shorter tread block and less void between each creates the maximum contact patch on paved roads, while a taller tread with larger gaps between blocks will be conducive to grip on dirt trails, since the tires can bite into and conform around the terrain more.

Sizing

Tire sizes can be a little confusing. The first number is the width of the tread in millimeters. The second number is the height of the sidewall, represented as a percentage of the tread width. The third number is the wheel diameter that the tire fits on. So for example, a 225/50-15 tire would have a 225-millimeter-wide tread, a sidewall that’s 112.5 millimeters high, and it would fit on a 15-inch rim.

Ratings

If you have a pickup that you use for hauling serious loads or pulling trailers, you should have light-truck-rated tires instead of the standard P-metric tires designed for most passenger vehicles. Light trucks are considered to be any available for regular use, as opposed to commercial transportation or industrial purposes. The tires are generally standard-issue on three-quarter and one-ton pickups, but they’re also stiffer than normal tires, which can mean a harsher ride. Make sure that you’re balancing how much you plan on hauling, and how often, with the kinds of surfaces you’ll be driving on.

Highway Passenger

General-use tires for everyday driving are typically called passenger tires, and within that classification, there are dozens of different types for daily use. Some are good for light off-roading, and some are burly for longer lifespans. Others are built for luxury and comfort or specifically to improve your fuel mileage with low-rolling resistance. And then there are the tires that straddle multiple different disciplines, like all-season tires. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll gloss over most of those categories and instead focus on the three other main types of tires. Just know that if a tire is designed for more than one purpose, it’s inherently a compromise and may not be the best for a specific task.

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Winter

We’ll start with a type of tire often overlooked by American drivers: the winter tire. All of Germany and parts of Canada mandate their use during inclement weather seasons. I asked Tire Rack’s product-information specialist Woody Rogers to explain when you should consider winter tires. “In the simplest terms, winter tires are suitable for any driver whose winter season consists of average temperatures below 40 degrees and who experiences anything more than infrequent snow, slush, or ice conditions,” he says.

Winter tires are formulated with generally more silica, to give your vehicle maximum traction on ice and snow. Most people only associate traction with being able to accelerate without spinning their wheels, but it’s incredibly important for cornering and braking as well. As a general rule, don’t think every good winter tire is wide; you want a narrower one on snow-covered or icy roads so the car’s weight can sink them into the snow instead of skating over the top of it.

Rather than just having a set of winter tires, it’s helpful to mount them on a second set of dedicated wheels, so you can change them out yourself at the first sign of cold weather instead of needing a shop to swap tires onto your wheels. Generally, it’s a good idea to get a set of wheels downsized an inch from stock, allowing for a taller and softer sidewall than your everyday tires but in a total package that’s the same size. A softer sidewall will deal with ice chunks and potholes better.

Even if you live somewhere temperate that doesn’t require winter tires, if you take frequent drives to ski resorts, I recommend getting a set. The safety and peace of mind provided by winter tires is invaluable. And they could save you thousands of dollars when you stop just short of rear-ending the car in front of you, whereas your all-seasons might leave your front bumper in their back seat. Owning a second set of winter tires for your car is rarely inexpensive, especially for modern cars and trucks, but for an average set of 18-inch wheels and tires, budget at least $1,000.

I’m a fan of Bridgestone’s Blizzak, invented in the early 1990s as the first modern studless winter tire. The line remains one of the best options for any driver.

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Off-Road Truck and SUV

If your plan is to head out into the wilderness, be it for light overlanding, the occasional fire road, or heady rock-crawling trails, you’ll need something better suited to the task than a run-of-the-mill highway tire.

The tread pattern of an off-road-capable tire is much more aggressive, typified by a larger void between tread blocks. The width of the void area allows the tread blocks to sink down into loose surfaces like dirt, rocks, light sand, and mud to gain traction. This tread pattern is also much deeper than a typical tire’s, allowing the voids to be filled by the low-grip terrain, effectively treating the treads as individual paddles scrabbling for traction.

You want strength in a tire that you plan to take into deep forest trails or across miles of desolate desert, and for that reason these tires are built to be resistant to cuts, chips, and tearing. (A standard highway tire would be torn up relatively easily after a short time off-road.) The sidewalls of off-road tires are thicker, reinforced with extra steel, fabric, and high-density rubber to help prevent cuts and punctures.

That stronger sidewall also helps prevent the tire from coming loose from the bead of the wheel. Tires are designed so that, when inflated, the internal pressure pushes the bead of the tire against the inside of the wheel rim. You should air down the tires each and every time you go off-road to give them larger footprints on particularly sandy or slick dirt and rock. Twenty psi is a good pressure to start with. (Consult your owner’s manual for safe on-road pressures, and inflate to those before you return to pavement.) Be careful not to remove too much air, though, as the tire can de-bead and deflate. When you’re forty miles down an unbeaten path, that’s a real problem. The stronger sidewall makes it less likely that the the tire will deform in a way that would separate it from the rim.

There are varying levels of off-road tire performance, including dedicated models that will be too stiff and loud for street use. Take mud-terrain tires, which have the most capability (save on sand). But the large, chunky tread creates vibrations when slammed into hard pavement. That hard rubber is great for longevity in the dirt, but it’s a hellacious noise when pressed into daily driving duty. An all-terrain tire will perform much better on asphalt and is all most people need for the level of off-roading they’re doing.

It’s always best to talk to an experienced off-roader before you commit to purchasing a tire for your specific needs. If you want a daily-driver tire that is also capable of dirt-trail driving, check out BF Goodrich’s All-Terrain T/A KO2. These can be mounted on a standard wheel, and an 18-inch will cost around $900 for just the tires.

While many people never even think about their tires, they are the single most important factor when it comes to your vehicle’s performance. There are also plenty of places, like Tire Rack, where you can read consumer reviews of a specific tire before you buy. Having the proper tire for your needs can mean making it up a hill and getting to your destination and back. Get the right rubber.